LOS ANGELES — We have yet to definitively place John Adams within the contours of American music, especially since he is still active in the field. But that didn’t stop the composer-conductor, who turns 79 on Feb. 15, from providing some perspectives of his own at Disney Hall on Jan. 25 as a guest conductor (and longtime creative chair) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Adams certainly wasn’t shy about adjoining his latest piano concerto, After the Fall, with works by three other important American composers of yore — Charles Ives, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland. These hardy fellows from Connecticut, Oklahoma (by way of suburban Los Angeles), and Brooklyn, N.Y., respectively, were represented by their best-known and, some would argue, greatest pieces. At the very least, this was savvy, stimulating programming for these ears.
After the Fall received its world premiere in January 2025 by the San Francisco Symphony with David Robertson conducting (reviewed in CVNA). But this time, for its downstate premiere, the composer was on the podium directing traffic, with the dedicatee, Vikingur Ólafsson, returning to the keyboard.
The LA Phil performance was prefaced by exactly the same piece that San Francisco heard — Ives’ ever mysterious, ever eloquently enigmatic The Unanswered Question (one wonders whether this was Adams’ intention both times or just a coincidence).
Ives’ metaphysical meditation — played in Disney Hall during its very first concert back in 2003 — is almost conductor-proof, and Adams ably maintained its quietly troubling serenity, with the lone trumpet sounding the “question” from somewhere in the balcony and four flutes querulously answering from the choral seats behind the orchestra.
On to After the Fall, whose introduction sparkled more seductively and with greater detail than before in the Disney Hall acoustic. Adams gave his nearly half-hour, single-movement concerto a slightly faster pace and a bit more choppy agitation than Robertson did, thoroughly in touch with his characteristic grooves, while drawing out the sudden slow fade at the close quite effectively.
Ólafsson revealed an even more refined, crystalline touch, never overly showy, audibly relishing the stretch where the quotes from the Prelude in C minor from J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier gradually seep into the fabric of the third section of Adams’ piece. Adams has again effectively mined the music of past masters and integrated it deeply into his own idiom, a sort of twist on the neo-classical method championed by Stravinsky a century ago. The recording microphones were out in profusion above the orchestra, so we might expect to see this either on Adams’ label (Nonesuch) or, more likely, Ólafsson’s (Deutsche Grammophon).
For an encore, Ólafsson did some neo-classisizing (if I may invent a word) himself. “It’s not something you heard in the third movement, but it’s not that far away,” he told the audience before playing an Alexander Siloti arrangement in B minor of Bach’s Prelude in E Minor, BWV 855/1. With its attractive melody over the Bach figurations, it came off a lot like Gounod’s transformation of another Bach WTC prelude, “Ave Maria.”
Adams performed a real mitzvah by having Harris’ eloquently rugged, steadily evolving, single-movement Symphony No. 3 launch the second half. This was once considered to be The Great American Symphony, but it fell into neglect when mid-20th-century composers of Americana were tossed into the old-fogies bin by the serial-music crowd.
The program book incorrectly claimed that this was the first LA Phil performance; I remember hearing Erich Leinsdorf conduct it here in 1990, and there must have been more. But it had been a long time, and Adams’ sometimes hard-driven (in Part One) yet almost always on-point performance drove home its tightly-knit structure and magical Pastoral episode, with its bitonal/polytonal strings and gathering momentum.
Not only that, but Adams also presented the piece whole, restoring the two large cuts in the “Pastoral” section that are observed in the two famous Leonard Bernstein recordings, among others. May we someday hear more of Harris’ underperformed 13 symphonies; the great ones in my experience are Nos. 3, 5, 6, and 7.
Copland’s Appalachian Spring suite, again done rather quickly yet with the Americana ethos of the wide-open meditations and the bounce of the folk dances shining through, concluded the concert. As before, the LA Phil was on its toes for its creative chair, who didn’t try to interpret much and didn’t have to.
